Tag Archives: songs

A student told me recently she thinks God only created her to fulfill the needs of other people – making food, cleaning house, doing laundry. References to her family – she’s unmarried and keeps house for her widower father and two brothers – always carry a note of conditioned disappointment. She takes care of them all, they do nothing to help her (and, in fact, sometimes the opposite).

I tried to offer briefly another story – one of a God who created us simply to delight in us. To enjoy us and to delight us with Presence. Her name in Hindi means “song” and I was desperate to say something to her that would open her ears to the song of love being sung over her.

This blog has fallen silent over the past few weeks in large part because I’m a teacher again. I’ve got four hours of classes a day I’m responsible for. Eleven students to welcome and to figure out and to teach. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying to be back in the classroom. My students seem to feel the same way.

There’s something about learning something new – perhaps most especially a new language – that leaves people feeling vulnerable at best, like a hopeless idiot at worst. One student is so petrified of saying the wrong thing in front of his classmates, he literally mouthed his answers to me voicelessly for the first several weeks of class. His answers are very nearly always right.

Every student comes with a story about themselves. A story written in their head, but heavily informed by the input of others. One student told me she was humiliated as a child in Hindi class every day by the teacher because she couldn’t do the standard dictation exercises. Another said she tried to explain where she was getting stuck in English to a teacher and was completely dismissed and told she would never understand. It’s all a lot of baggage to be carrying around.

As a teacher, you end up doing this delicate dance of hearing the communication students aren’t willing to say out loud. You look for the students who are trying to hide. You work for ways to show their own potential to the student who thinks they are completely incompetent.

As a teacher, I bring my own baggage too. Just the other day, I found myself correcting students harshly. There was a thinly veiled superiority in the way I explained the present perfect and past perfect tenses. When I stopped to consider why I was suddenly psyco-teacher, I realized I was trying to make up for a morning of feeling like a complete, incompetent idiot. My own mistake and misunderstanding had led to a bunch of wasted time and work. Maybe it would make me feel better if I could prove how awesome I am to my students…

The baggage doesn’t just distract in the classroom, does it? We each one of us are telling ourselves a story about who we are. It is rarely a positive and life-giving story. We dodge relationships because the story in our head says that people will only ever hurt us. We shrink from trying something new because we’ve been told there’s nothing worse than failing. We work desperately to keep up appearances because what will people think if they know we’re exhausted and dying a little on the inside?

But then there are blessed moments when someone looks to hear the communication we’re not willing to say out loud. When someone does the delicate dance of seeking out what we’re trying to hide and naming our own potential. When someone offers grace for our failures, hope in our silence, encouragement for our disappointment. Someone who opens our ears just a little bit to hear the song of love and delight being sung over us. A song that says we have been seen even while trying to hide, known even while trying to fake it and still He has died for us.

More often, I think, we’re too busy hiding ourselves to sing one another into the light. But perhaps, if we learn to sing this song to one another, to offer this bit of grace to one another, the stories we tell ourselves might just become a bit fuller of life.

Watching my friend’s profile stare into the passing evening, shop lights reflecting on her face through the bus window. We three have made this journey so many times, we can predict the curves of the road. They bring along headphones and we plug them into our phones and listen to music.

At first, she chooses songs we both know – songs that have a special memory attached. We have danced to these songs at birthday parties or “welcome back” parties or just because parties. We do miniatures of our best dance moves discreetly in the seat, bobbing our heads back and forth, bringing our shoulders up and down to the beat. We try hard not to laugh loudly, but the other passengers can’t help but stare at our merriment.

Then she moves on to songs I have not heard. They are not dancing songs. I listen intently, trying to pick out from the twisted grammar unique to songs what each is about. Mostly there is unrequited love, or forbidden love, or painful love, or secret love.

Then sometimes we hit a song that sounds like one of the ones played as a background in a Bollywood movie. The part in the movie where the main character has worked through his issues and is on his way to set things right. The part where the skies seem bluer, the rice fields seem greener, and the children happier than ever before. The part where everything is deeply good.

And when we come to that song, it brings a background aura to our bumpy, dusty trip. I’m suddenly nostalgic and find that – indeed – the boys we pass are playing cricket in an extraordinarily emerald pasture framed by a brilliant azure sky.

***

The first CD I ever owned I bought when I was fifteen with a gift card given me by a friend as a going away present. My family was making a huge move. It felt like an irrevocable change to my identity. It was a journey for which we had no roadmap, no previous experience.

The CD was Rebecca St. James’ Worship God. I listened to it every day. Hearing her rendition of “Let My Words Be Few” takes me instantly back to lying face down in my new bedroom, sobbing out my frustrations and worries to a God who – I had suddenly realized – I needed. Desperately.

The songs served as a liturgy, growing familiar in the midst of unfamiliarity. I would worship and cry and pray, following the movement of the lyrics. Then, the last song would begin. She’d turned Zephaniah 3:17 into a song – singing God’s promise to “quiet you with his love… rejoice over you with singing”. In that moment, leaning into that promise, I thought I could almost hear God’s song. I could almost feel Him hovering over me, whispering quiet love.

It was the part where everything was a little clearer, a little more brilliant.
The part where everything is deeply good.

Don’t you hate it when a song is stuck in your head? Especially when all you can remember is that one line from the chorus?

“Jai, Jai Shiv aur Ram” is a song lyric that’s sometimes stuck in my head. In English: “Praise, praise to Shiva and Ram”.

Directly across from my house is a large ghat or special designated area for those who want to bathe in the Ganges. Every night at sunset, they hold a special five minute moment of worship and blare that song.

Ghat During the Day

After hearing this song every day forseven months I know this song. I understand most of the words. I can sing along. Sometimes, in my house, when I’m cleaning and my brain is switched into neutral I suddenly “awake” to find myself humming this tune.

The music is blared so loudly that nothing – not a movie, not music from an Ipod, not being in a friend’s house a block away – drowns out the song. I begin to understand why blasting rock music at prisoners is used as torture…

While it’s (very!) easy to get angry at whoever has the volume control settings over there – I’ve been thinking about all of the “songs” sung to me in my own culture. Ones that weren’t set to quite such a catchy melody – but got stuck in my brain anyway.

Songs with choruses like, “I’ve got rights, I’ve got privileges” or “You take care of yours, I’ll take care of mine”. Those have gotten stuck in my brain and at random moments I find myself humming the tune and (most scarily!) agreeing with the sentiments.

I’m beginning to appreciate more Romans 12:2 – “But be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Renewing the mind is like trying to get a song dislodged from the brain…

Getting the song “Praise, praise to Shiva and Ram” stuck out of my head often entails listening to a different song… preferably a “Praise, praise to Jesus” type. Maybe that’s one reason people in the Psalms say to Praise the Lord with a new song. Instead of the lyrics our culture blasts at us over and over again, we turn our minds to ones like “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty” and “Knowing You, Jesus, There is no greater thing”. These songs get my mind off of myself, my rights, or Ram… whatever idol happens to be pressing in and back where a renewed mind should be.

What songs help you refocus on Jesus and renew your mind to praise Him?